Friday, 20 December 2013

The
collective nouns that are used for animals reveals a poetic sensibility that
can be evocative but can also be downright impolite. If you were a rhinoceros
and hanging out with other rhinos would you want to be referred to as ‘a crash of
rhinoceroses’? Or if you were a hippopotamus and were gathering with other
hippos would ‘a bloat of hippopotamuses’ float your boat? And I think calling a
collection of tigers ‘an ambush of tigers’ is just pre-judging them, just
expecting them to misbehave. Birds on the whole come out of this a lot better.
‘A parliament of owls’ is suggestive of thoughtfulness and deliberation even if
today’s politicians tend to spoil these associations. You couldn’t imagine
anything nicer than ‘a charm of goldfinches’ could you? But even with birds the
naming of collectives takes on a gothic tilt: ‘a gulp of magpies’; ‘a murder of
crows’; ‘an unkindness of ravens’.

A
murmuration of starlings has to be the best way of naming a collection of
starlings, and therefore the best collective noun because starlings are really head
and shoulders above the rest of us when it comes to being and acting
collectively. For anyone who has witnessed a murmuration of starlings coming in
to land in some wetlands, or finding a perch on the burnt out remains of a
pleasure pier, it is a stunning sight of pulsing, swooping, flitting movement
choreographed by thousands and thousands of birds in synchronised formations.
The patterns that these starlings make are formless forms: it looks as if they
are constantly on the verge of revealing something – a word, or the face of god.
Murmuration is as near as you can get to describing the sorts of clustering
that starlings make: it doesn’t suggest the visual aspect of their swarming but
nails the white-noise impact of their movement, and the crescendos and diminuendos
of their gathering. I think we should reserve the word murmuration for
starlings, but if we did use it in another context it might be fitting, albeit
differently, for actors. Thus ‘a murmuration of extras’ would designate a large
group of actors in a restaurant scene, for instance, whose main role is to
provide visual noise and the sort of rise and fall of a humming murmur as
background to the protagonists’ dialogue.

According
to Chris Pagham – friend to the ordinary animal, scourge to those who
sentimentalise cuteness – Britain is steadily losing its starling populations.
It turns out that this has nothing much to do with global warming but is linked
to global politics; to be precise, to a form of dictatorial state control in
the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s. It seems that Comrade Stalin was super
keen on starlings as a form of natural pest control. He authorised a Union wide
programme of environmental encouragement to starlings. When winter froze the
ground the starlings migrated, and some of them came to Britain. In the 1940s
the winter population of starlings in East Anglia alone was roughly forty
million. Now that must have been some spectacle.

Thursday, 19 December 2013

In
the November 1967 issue of Good
Housekeeping a double page advertisement announces that ‘North Sea gas is
coming’. On one side there is writing persuading you to invest £263 on a ‘High
Speed gas central heating system’ – ‘the only kind that’s going to run on gas
from the North Sea’ – on the other side a photograph of the North Sea
(presumably) at sunset. The cold, dark abyss of the sea is glowing yellow and
orange from the reflected sun. Perhaps central heating could do this for you –
add a warm glow to the cold, dark abyss of your home? At the bottom of the
photograph there is a slightly embarrassed aside “…the best bit of luck for 100
years!” It wouldn't do to crow too much about national good fortune.

In
the May of 1967 the Natural Gas Conversion Programme was started. Every
appliance that ran on gas (cookers, the odd fridge, water heaters and so on)
needed altering to be able to use the new type of gas. In the end some forty
million appliances were converted, at the cost of £563 million. Britain was ‘switched
over’ district by district. A district would be isolated from the network and
purged with a huge flame, flaring off what was left of the old gas before the
new gas was introduced. Armies of gas engineers went house to house to ensure
that all appliances were safe and working. The programme took ten years to complete.

Natural
gas might have been expensive to install but it was a cheaper product than the
old coal gas. Coal-gas, town-gas, or (with more than a nod to its original
purpose) illuminating-gas was the result of an industrial process, and that
required large factories for its production. Natural gas arrived, ready to go,
from beneath the seabed. The cheapness of natural gas, and its sense of national
luck, would have been one crucial incentive for many households to have central
heating fitted. The years of the conversion programme follow the years in which
central heating gathers momentum in Britain. It is only towards the end of the
1970s when over 50% of households have central heating. But another crucial
incentive is home ownership: who would install central heating in a house they
were renting? If old Victorian terraces were the architecture of coal-burning
grates, and 1930s suburban semis the architecture of the gas fire, then the
architecture of central heating was open-plan. Central heating fuelled a
culture of shag-pile, floor cushions and informality.

Town
gas was the kind of gas you could kill yourself with. ‘Sticking your head in
the oven’ used to be the vernacular expression for suicide in general. I don’t
know whether death by gas was more or less common than other forms of suicide,
but it had a symbolism that other suicides didn't have. I guess it was the ease
and domesticity of it that gave it such an awful symbolism, as well as the link
to the Holocaust. It was a form of death that was available in the kitchen, on
tap, so to say. I'm sure that Sylvia Plath would have had an intuitive sense of
that symbolism when she chose this as her way of ending it all in 1963. Natural
gas, on the other hand, wasn't going to kill anyone any time soon. You were
more likely to blow yourself up than suffocate, and no chance of the woozy
dreamless embrace of carbon monoxide poisoning. Natural gas was modern, clean
and looked to the future.

In
1968 I started going to school in Chelmsford. Approaching Chelmsford from the
east on the A12 on a dark winter’s morning, facing the inevitable traffic jam
coming off the duel carriage-way you could see the Chelmsford gasworks on the
right hand side. Or at least this is what I remember. It was huge. A mass of
gleaming metal pipework, with each pipe illuminated by a string of electric
light. It looked other-worldly. A gleaming citadel of metal and light with a
flame jet burning off some residual gas. It smelt of sulphur. Natural gas would
mean the end for the Chelmsford Gas Works, which had been producing gas since
the early nineteenth century. Now the Gas Works has gone, the ground is
contaminated, and the wasteland is home to some of the most respected graffiti
art in Essex. In 1968, in the dark, with all that fire, electric light and
metal, it looked like the beginning of the film Blade Runner. When Blade
Runner came out in 1982 it seemed to be describing a future of ‘replicants’
and ‘off-world colonies’, but really it was showing us our past.

Hello

I teach cultural studies at the University of Sussex in England. I have written a few academic books - most recently A Passion for Cultural Studies and Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. My first non-academic book was published with Profile. It came out in January 2014 and is called The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House.